The Making of Snacksss is a series of blog posts where we reveal what went into making the Snacksss game, from concept to a finished product on the App Store.

The Concept

Over the years, even before the iPhone existed, I had always wondered what it would be like to make a simulation game where you lived the life of an animal in the wild, whether it be a bird, or even a rattlesnake. Games have always been about controlling some other character and vicariously living through them and receiving the experience as close to first-person as you can without physically being there. So, why not a game where you live as a rattlesnake?

Enter Snacksss, a concept originally born to be a simulation game, until after much thought, we realized a simulation game just isn’t quite as fun. In fact, to some it may even be a bit gruesome! The wild isn’t always all that pretty. We also wanted to make sure Snacksss was a simple and easy enough game for users to play and get a taste of before we started creating a lot of content for it. We planned on adding in a lot more features up front, but we strongly believe that community feedback is critical to a game, and because there’s nothing out there like this game, we have no examples to live by.

If my team were helping me write this blog post, they’d tell me to tell you about the combo moves in the game. When I first designed Snacksss, you moved from left to right on the screen and THEN ate your prey. You would also not be able to fly through the air but rather would need to reach up and eat a bird as it got close. Early on, I had gotten into a debate with the team on keeping it as realistic as possible, but they were so insistent on making Snacksss be able to do combo moves while in the air, that we changed the gameplay to match that. To this day, I have to admit that they were right and people are continuously raving about how much fun it is to make combos. The combo moves are a lot of fun, and we may add some more moves soon that will be even more killer.

In my next update, I’ll be co-writing with Davide Bianca, CEO of our partner studio, Saizen Media, who is responsible for art directing Snacksss and why it looks so fantastic.

Before I leave you, I’m sharing a funny image which was used as reference for the game’s depth. I’ll get some flak from the team and Davide about it. Talk about a work of art!